In this piece for Mar (violin), Bertel (saxophone), Nico (guitar) and Yves (percussion), I have been diving into speech transcription as the basis for instrumental material. I’m embracing an interplay of music and language cobbled together from recorded conversations between myself and the members of NADAR – primarily from the first time we spoke to each other on a video call. By carefully selecting and composing with conversational snippets that showcase the performers’ individual musical and off-stage personalities, I try to bring to the fore the complexities of creative control and the presentation of ‘self’ involved in collaborative endeavours.
The piece meditates on the notion that all compositional prescriptions, whether pitches and rhythms, expression markings or prompts for performativity, carry with them the potential to recast the performer as an altered version of themselves. By working with this reality, the composer has a potential to become a narrator of sorts.
As the performers’ words, videos of their mouth movements (visemes) and instrumental sounds intertwine, the latent musicality in their speech is revealed while the line between reality and absurdity becomes blurry.
Commissioned by Gaudeamus Festival in connection with the Gaudeamus Award 2025 and the Nadar Summer School
Matthew Grouse
